More From Old Greenwich Connecticut
-
Old Greenwich Connecticut Vintage Retro Giclée Print Art Series Poster
Regular price From $38.00 USDRegular price -
Old Greenwich Connecticut Vintage Retro Cotton Canvas Tote Bag - Black Logo
Regular price $28.00 USDRegular price -
Old Greenwich Connecticut Vintage Retro Cotton Jersey Baby Bodysuit - Black Logo
Regular price $26.00 USDRegular price -
Old Greenwich Connecticut Vintage Retro Vinyl Sticker - Black Logo
Regular price From $6.00 USDRegular price
Why was Old Greenwich once called Sound Beach? Because for fifty-nine years, it was. When the railroad put a station here in 1872, the village took the name of its shoreline and became "Sound Beach" — a summer-resort brand for a summer-resort age. It kept the name until 1931, when the village asked for its history back and was rechristened Old Greenwich, a plain statement of fact: this was the oldest part of the town, the founding ground everything else grew from. Three names in three centuries — the Old Town, Sound Beach, Old Greenwich — and all three describe the same few streets between the brooks and the Sound.
The remarkable line in the founding record is Elizabeth's. The surviving purchase notes her own "particular purchase" of the peninsula — not her husband's, hers — at a time when a married woman holding land in her own name startled her neighbors. The maps did not mind: for over a hundred years the point appeared in colonial records as Elizabeth's Neck. Her early village sat on a contested edge of the map, too — for a time in the 1640s this coast lay under Dutch New Netherland, the working border between New Amsterdam's world and New England's, before Connecticut's side of the line prevailed. Elizabeth herself eventually moved on, but her Neck stayed in village hands: the Ferris family held it for more than a hundred and fifty years.
Why People Visit Old Greenwich
Old Greenwich offers the Connecticut Gold Coast at its most low-key — a real shore village with a beach peninsula, a pond park, and a handful of streets of shops, plus the quiet distinction of being where Greenwich began. Visitors come for Tod's Point and the Sound, the founding history, and the unhurried village pace, and stay for the beaches, the coves, and the deep-rooted New England feel. It is refined, historic, and genuinely Connecticut.
